Desde Domingo (Since Sunday)

There are too many things to say to make this post complete, so I´ll try to stick to the highlights.

I flew into Miami on Sunday, September 2nd, at around noon. There are 37 other volunteers in the 2007 Fall Ecuador WorldTeach program, and almost all of us had a chance to meet one another and prepare for the flight to Quito (which is surprisingly only about 4 hours from Florida). The flight was a story in and of itself: It was then that it truly hit me that after all these months of fees and paperwork, after all of the mental preparation and repacking and see-you-laters, that this was finally going to happen to me. Only 12 hours before then I had been partying with my friends for the Badgers´ first home game, and now I was going to a third world country half a world away. We arrived in Quito, Ecuador´s capital, I passed through customs without a problem, and, before I knew it, we were headed for our hotel, all 37 members´ luggage contained like marbles in the back of a huge pickup truck as we gazed back from the bus that drove us to our hotel. A quarter for the driver from each of us was considered a generous tip. To tip a worker for any service-based profession--waiters, taxi drivers, etc.--isn´t at all expected here.

I was put into a room with three other volunteers, Chris from Hawaii, John from Seattle and Charlie from Mississippi. If I shot a paintball at a map of the United States, one at each of the WorldTeach volunteers´home states, no part of the country would be dry. Even though the WorldTeach office is located out east, the Midwest has (I think) the largest representation out of any other region. I´m very pleased, however, to be the only individual from Wisconsin. I´ve done everything in my power to toss as many Bucky references into normal conversation as possible (and for all those UW alums, pretty much everyone in the program has something great to say about either Madtown or the university--I´m really amazed by the weight that name carries). I slept as much as Kane and Therese, our in-country program coordinators, allowed before getting up in time for my first Ecuadorian meal, a sort of pastry bread, some sort of fruit jam and a glass of pineapple juice--none of that canned crap. As you can imagine, fruit juice here is a staple. Bebida de mora is blackberry juice and I wish I could ship it to the states by the boat load.

The rest of the week has been orientation and teacher training. So far we´ve only covered the basics. Safety concerns are probably the most interesting thing I can talk about here (without saying too much because I know my mom´s already a nervous wreck). The site I´ve been assigned to in Ecuador, Santa Elena or Saint Helen in English, lies along the Pacific Ocean, and below 1500 meters of elevation, you´re in a malaria zone. I´ll have to start taking mefloquine, an anti-malarial medication, two weeks prior to living in Santa Elena, which doesn´t seem like too bad of a deal until I tell you that the adverse side effect of mefloquine is extremely vivid dreams and, more commonly, extremely vivid nightmares. So now I have the choice between susceptibility to malaria and seeing some crazy-ass stuff that will probably feel like it actually happened to me when my body shocks itself awake in the early morning hours. I´ve also learned there´s nothing anyone can do if I come down with Dengue Fever, which will lay me out for about two weeks as I try to manage the disease´s pain the Peace Corps nurse described as coming from deep within my bones, that is until my body can build its immunity. Don´t worry though, mom, we also started Spanish classes!

On the subject of Spanish, I can´t even begin to thank Señora Clark and Señnor Scharpf enough. From buying Q-tips in una tienda to speaking for the first time with my host family, I can´t stress how appreciative I am that they were good (and by that I mean tough) teachers. I definitely did not spend enough time studying this summer, which doesn´t say much anyway because no tape or CD can replace true immersion, even if the CIA does permit its sticker of approval to be pasted on the jacket. Slowly but surely, all those little acronyms and rhymes that illustrate a grammar point or allow me to conjugate a verb are coming back to me. I will forever hate por versus para.

By the second night I met my new host family, who I´ll be staying with for the next month during orientation. Miguel is my new ¨father¨ and I couldn´t understand enough of the first night´s conversation to know what he does for a living. Marcia is my new ¨mother¨and does all the cooking and cleaning for the family (sorry, Steph, Ecuador and much of South America is so sexist they don´t even know that they are). Miguel and David are their sons: Miguel is around thirty years old and is an architect currently working on some of the roads in Quito; David is nineteen and studies math in the Ecuadorian equivalent of college. David also speaks very broken English, but his vocabulary is fantastic. Anita is Miguel and Marcia´s daughter; she is turning twenty-seven by the middle of this month, is married to another man who also lives in my new home and whose name I´ve forgotten in the midst of this barrage of information. He is quiet, she is not. Together, they have a six-month-old child, whose name I´m going to spell Stephanie because it´s pronounced the same in Spanish expect for the -f sound. The whole family is a strict group of Evangelical Christians and the house itself is a renovated church. It´s beautiful and much more homey than one might imagine. The ground level floors are all shards of tile grouted together and there is a sweet tomato tree outside with a lone, sad little tomato. I also live with Issac from California and John from Seattle (the same as before). They are both very well-traveled and, as such, their Spanish comprehensions are much greater than mine. They are not the exception, but the rule. Everyone else in the program has traveled, lived or studied abroad in another country at some point in their lives... except for me. I´d like to think that I´m no less adaptable than they are, even if I was, prior to now, a virgin in that respect. I speak and understand, however, more than half of them. Even so, I´ve had to leech onto Isaac for the last three nights to say what I´ve had to say to Miguel and the rest. Don´t worry, though, he does things the right way. He gives me enough time to stumble through what I want to say before inventing a new way to say it himself. This allows me the practice I´m going to need to improve, and I´ve already made huge gains still with under a week in the country. You´d all laugh if you could see me play charades with these Ecuadorians....